Like Richard Dawkins, I am also an atheist. I have also
enjoyed his books and I am peripherally aware of his atheist
advocacy.

Recently a letter Richard Dawkins wrote to his 10 year old
daughter made
the rounds.

He needs to ammend the letter and explain to her that it is
not enough to find evidence, it is also important to be able
to reason effectively about this evidence and avoid a series
of logical
pitfalls.

He failed to do this in a series of poorly
thought out tweets, starting with this:

All the world's
Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College,
Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages,
though.

His original tweet, while true, does not have the effect of
trying to advance our understanding of the world. It is at
best a troll.

We expect from scientists to use the processes, techniques
and tools of science math and logic to advance our
understanding of the world, not resort to innuendo, fallacies
and poor logical constructions to prove our points.

Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

Today he posted
a large
follow up where he explains what lead him to make this
statement and also to selectively address some
of the the criticism he received. He addressed the simpler
criticism, but left out the meaty ones (you can find them on
the replies to his tweet).

Dawkins failed to address the major problem with
his tweet, which was exactly the use of correlation to imply
causation.

Instead, he digs down deeper:

Twitter's 140 character limit always presents a tough
challenge, but I tried to rise to it. Nobel Prizes are a
pretty widely quoted, if not ideal, barometer of excellence in
science. I thought about comparing the numbers of Nobel Prizes
won by Jews (more than 120) and Muslims (ten if you count
Peace Prizes, half that if you don't). This astonishing
discrepancy is rendered the more dramatic when you consider
the small size of the world's Jewish population. However, I
decided against tweeting that comparison because it might seem
unduly provocative (many Muslim "community leaders" are quite
outspoken in their hatred of Jews) and I sought a more neutral
comparison as more suitable to the potentially inflammable
medium of Twitter. It is a remarkable fact that one Cambridge
college, Trinity, has 32 Nobel Prizes to its credit. That's
three times as many as the entire Muslim world even if you
count Peace Prizes, six times as many if you don't. I
dramatised the poverty of Muslim scientific achievement, and
the contrast with their achievements in earlier centuries, in
the following brief tweet: "All the world's Muslims have fewer
Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great
things in the Middle Ages, though."

Now we know that Richard was not merely stating a couple of
facts on his original tweet. He was trying to establish a
relationship between a religion and scientific progress.

One possible explanation that does not involve Muslim-hood
is that the majority of muslims live in impoverished nations
(see
map). Poverty and access to resources are likely bigger
reasons for the lack of advancement in the sciences than
belonging to a particular religion.

Let us consider my country, Mexico, a poor country compared
to the wealth of the UK. We have twice as many people living
in Mexico compared to the UK. Sadly, we only have three Nobel
laureates
vs Trinity
College's thirty two.

If we expand the scope to Latin America which has half a
billion people. Even with this, we can only muster sixteen
laureates vs Trinity's 32.

Let us look into the African continent, with its billion
people. They manage to only score 20 Nobel laureates.

And shockingly, the wealthier the nation, the more
laureates. South Africa accounts for half of Africa's
laureates (with ten), Egypt which has a better economy than
most other African nations and gets tasty American aid gets five,
which leaves another five for the rest of the continent.

If I had some axe to grind against Mexicans, Spanish
speakers, Africans, Muslims, Bedouins, Brazilians, or Latin
Americans I could probably make a statement as truthful as
Richard's original tweet, which could be as offensive to those
popuations and just like Richard prove absolutely
nothing.

I think we have stronger evidence that access to wealth has
an effect on how many people get this award than a religion.

The second flaw in his argument is to identify a University
with access to funds, and a fertile ground for research and
education to a group of people linked only by religion.

Perhaps people go to places like Trinity College becasue it
is a fertile ground for research and education. If that is
the case, then we have an explanation for why Trinity might
have more Nobel laureates.

Luckily, Cesar Hidalgo's
research on understanding
prosperity shows what we intuitively know: that economic
development clusters around existing centers. That is why
actors, writers and directors move to LA, financiers move to
New York and why companies ship their high-end phone
manufacturing to China. You go where there is a fertile
ground. Richard, instead of reading the long papers from
Cesar, you might want to watch
this 17 minute
presentation he did at TEDx Boston.

So is Trinity one of these clusters? Can we find other
clusters of research and expect them to have a high
concentration of Nobel prize laureates? Let me pick two
examples, MIT which is next door to my office has 78 laureates
and I used to hang out at Berkeley because my mom graduated
from there, and they have 22.

So we have three universities with 132 Nobel laureates.

The following statement is just as true as Richard's
original tweet, and as pointless as his. Except I do not
malign a religion:

All the world's companies have fewer Nobel Prizes than
Universities do. Companies did great things in the Middle
Ages though.

In fact there is a universe of different segments of the
population that have fewer Nobel Prizes as Trinity. And
every once in a while someone will try to make connections
just like Richard did.

People will make their cases against groups of people based
on language, race, sexual preferences, political orientation,
food preferences, religion or even what video games they play.

We can not let poor logic cloud our judgement, no matter
how importants our points are.

I agree with Richard that I want less religion in this
world, and more science-based education. But if we are going
to advocate for more science-based education, let us not
resort to the
very processes
that are discredited by science to do so.

The Origins of the Tweet

We now
know that Richard could just not stomach someone saying
"Islamic science deserves enormous respect" and this is why he
launched himself into this argument.

I can only guess that this happened because he was
criticizing religion or Islam and someone told him "Actually,
you are wrong about this, Islam contributed to X and Y" and he
did not like his argument poked at.

The right answer is "You are correct, I did not consider
that" and then try to incorporate this new knowledge into
having a more nuanced position.